


to lay this body down

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Civil War, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 07:08:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9872831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Kentucky doesn't secede. But that doesn't keep any of them out of the war, sun glinting off their rifles and Raylan expecting never to see Boyd Crowder again in their short lives.





	

They hear about it on New Year’s Day — Lem Martins comes riding over the hills, rustles Pastor Carter out of his cups so he’ll ring the church bell. Once the whole damn county’s turned up, visiting interrupted and the day ruined and probably bad luck for the whole year, he announces that the governor called the assembly to vote on secession a few days back, just after Christmas.

The assembly voted no.

Pastor Carter is too intoxicated to hide his dismay: he’s been preaching slavery and singing hellfire to the federal government since The Great Baptist Schism fifteen years ago, back when Raylan was no more than ten.

Raylan’s certain that the good preacher’s stance on slavery has _nothing_ to do with Mr. Franks, the mayor, or his coterie of gentlemen that live on top of the hill, slave owners one and all. Patrons of the town, upstanding tithers, and owners of Harlan’s only saloon. The preacher is a man of God, after all, not to be swayed by earthly enticements. (Of course, Raylan has long suspected that Harlan has no gods but the ones living high above the holler, Clover Hill the Olympus of smaller men.)

Arlo spits his tobacco, smirks around his missing teeth. Arlo nearly got their house razed to the ground, a few months before, when the old man made no secret of his hope that war would come and burn all the goddamned uppity slave owners right out of the state, set fire to their houses, their land, and their negroes, too. Raylan’s daddy doesn’t love anything, but there’s little he hates more than black folks and the men who brought them into Kentucky and bought up all the land.

“So what happens now?” Raylan wonders aloud to no one in particular, once it’s clear that Lem doesn’t have anything else of import to pass along, but is happily accepting hard liquor and freshly baked cakes in return for his news.

“Tree’s sawn near all the way through,” Boyd murmurs obliquely, chin practically resting on Raylan’s shoulder, because Boyd is always standing too goddamned close to Raylan. “Now we wait to see which way it falls.”

“It’s too cold to split wood,” Raylan replies, looking at Boyd, his breath a burst of white brushing over Boyd’s pinked cheeks. Anybody listening would gainsay that — the ground is frozen but it ain’t snowing, not yet, and anyway, they’ve all chopped wood in worse.

Raylan isn’t talking about swinging an axe, though, nor about carting logs down the hill.

Boyd raises an eyebrow. “Is it?” he wonders, his lips chapped from the cold, blood drying in the cracks. “Because I thought we might consider cutting down that old pine tree in your daddy’s woods. We could perhaps meet there this afternoon?”

“Raylan Givens!” Ava appears out of the milling crowd, wraps herself around Raylan’s arm and leans heavily into his side. Her golden hair peeks out from below her winter hat, blue eyes and rosy cheeks and a smile that’s the subject of every cheerful song Raylan’s ever heard. “Ain’t you gonna walk me home?”

“Sure,” Raylan says, resting his ungloved hand over hers. He turns away from Boyd, then, but Boyd’s already gone, slipped away without waiting for Raylan’s nod.

He walks Ava home. She flutters her lashes, laughs like water splashing over rocks in a quiet brook, charming and beautiful and not all that bright, it seems, since she’s set her cap on marrying a mule farmer and the impoverished son of a crook.

He walks Ava home — turns down her repeated invitations to come inside and enjoy the desserts she’s worked days to make — and sets off into the woods, heading for the shattered silhouette of the old pine tree.

* * *

Unionists sweep the state elections, and by summer it’s clear that “compromise” was never anything but a Kentucky dream.

“There’s a war on,” Mayor Vernon Franks declares, click-clacking across the wooden floor in his expensive boots so he can stare hard at Raylan and Boyd where they’re playing cards in a corner of the saloon. “Young, able-bodied boys like you ought to be helping us win the fight.”

Arlo and Bo are conspiring a few tables away, close enough to hear. “That’s right,” Arlo agrees, grinning. “Son, why don’t you shoot _Vern_ here in the head. Maybe old Abe will pin a medal on your chest.”

Bo nods his agreement, peering at Franks and puffing at his pipe. “War is good for business,” he concurs, and they’re all familiar with the sort of blood-stained business he means. Franks scowls — would have gotten them banned from the saloon years ago, if it wasn’t impossible to move good liquor in or out of the county without Bo Crowder’s say — and leaves them be.

Boyd cheats at cards and Raylan puts him down, a bloody nose and few dark bruises that will bloom across the pale skin over his ribs.

He traces them with his fingertips, late that night, next to the old pine tree and lit by the waxing moon.

“You looking for another fight, boy?” Boyd asks, when Raylan presses at the edges of a bruise, wanting to hear the soft, pained noise that Boyd will make.

Raylan shakes his head, slides his hands to Boyd’s narrow hips and lets Boyd pull too hard on his hair. Fighting is done during the day: talk of Manassas in a bustling churchyard after service, troops marching through the mountains under a hot summer sun. At night, Raylan’s just looking for a few good dreams.

* * *

Raylan joins the Confederacy a few weeks later, mostly so he can block his daddy’s angry fists and hit him in the jaw with the full weight of secession behind him, before his Aunt Helen intervenes by shooting Arlo’s gun into the roof.

He straps his rifle to his back, packs some bread and meat and moonshine for the trip, and waves lovely Ava Randolph goodbye.

“You gonna leave without marrying me, Raylan?” she asks, blotting her tears in the homemade lace of her handkerchief.

“Girl as pretty as you, Miss Ava?” he replies, his hat on and his horse snuffling impatiently at the Randolphs’ sparse grass. “I best come home to find you living at the top of the hill and married to the new mayor.”

Ava kicks him in the leg, harder than any mule he’s raised, and he leans in and kisses her the way he’s wanted to since she turned fifteen. He kisses her in the daytime under the sun, a momentary reprieve from the war.

He doesn’t ride past the Crowders’ on his way south. There ain’t nobody there, anyhow. Boyd rode up to Lexington last week on _business_ , and it’s the sort of business that leaves a man several horses richer or leaves him strung up by the army — either army — with a noose around his goddamned neck.

Raylan takes familiar roads through the hills and into Tennessee, leaves Kentucky and horse thieving and the old, lightning-struck pine tree behind. He doesn’t leave word for Boyd. He doesn’t expect either of them will ever return.

* * *

Raylan joins John Morgan’s cavalry, and pledges allegiance to slavery, states’ rights, and the CSA.

Well, he _pledges_ it. But other than the chance to spit in his daddy’s eye, there ain’t much about the Confederacy that Raylan cares for; and, after all, it ain’t like there’s any fucking fidelity left in Raylan’s family name.

They’re happy to have him, another Kentucky boy for the cause; a good old-fashioned, traditional sharpshooter from the hills. They send him off to serve under Capt. Artie Mullen, not realizing quite what Capt. Mullen might sign Raylan up to do.

It’s there that he meets Rachel, the slave woman who does the cooking and the laundry for Mullen’s men, and who seems to spend more time _lost in the woods_ than cooking a damn thing.

It’s not until he starts paying attention to where she’s going that Lt. Timothy Gutterson — West Point graduate and veteran of Seminole Wars and more violence besides — threatens to shoot him.

Raylan puts it together pretty quick, after that, nowhere near as thick as his daddy always said. He tells Tim, honestly, he’d rather help them out than die in the woods that night. (He’d rather Tim shot him during the day, high noon if he could manage it, somewhere that Raylan ain’t surrounded by trees and thinking of charred wood and pale hands; but he doesn’t tell Tim that. Doesn’t expect he’d understand.)

Capt. Mullen brought Tim with him when their home state seceded, and they met Rachel, who had been running slaves north for nigh on five years, after her sister fell pregnant to the master’s son.

So during the day they ride out and raid Unionist outposts or they march in a straight line to nowhere, and at night they smuggle folks through the woods and into the dark, where they disappear into the arms of a network Rachel won’t reveal.

In April, they march west to the Tennessee River and into the Battle of Shiloh, intending to forcibly evict the Yankees from Pittsburg Landing.

They don’t succeed.

Raylan gets shot for the first time mid-morning on a warm spring day, the bullet tearing through his coat and lodging somewhere in his chest.

He’s supposed to think of Ava, he knows, crying crystalline tears and beautiful in her grief; or his mama, dead and buried now for nigh on twelve years.

He doesn’t.

He thinks of the storm that blew through the night he turned eight years old, rain lashing the roof and tearing through the oiled paper on the windows. He thinks of the lightning, blue-white like ice, arcing through the sky, lighting up the hills and fields and the black, wind-whipped branches of trees against the black sky. He thinks of the _crack_ the pine tree made, when the lightning struck through its core.

He thinks about pale fingers and pale skin and the dark blossom of a bruise over prominent ribs, bloody lips and the smell of charred wood.

“You’re lucky you ain’t dead,” Rachel says, days later, once Raylan’s survived the bullet and the fever and the retreat. “Though I ain’t so sure that bullet didn’t knock something loose in you, boy. You spent three days asking me if I thought you would bruise. You some kind of peach, Raylan, that we got to worry about bruises on your fragile white skin?”

* * *

They ride through Lexington that October. Raylan sends Tim and Rachel down to Harlan, which is a terrible idea, but the war’s getting worse and Rachel’s contacts are getting harder to find. They can’t get negroes north and they can’t keep them in the camps, and Raylan thinks it might not be so hard to create a different sort of camp in one of the unsettled hollers, a defensible place to send black folks and guns.

Well, the defensible place and the guns are all Rachel’s idea, but it’s Raylan who suggests they scout out the backwoods of his county and introduce themselves to Limehouse, if they can find the man and survive the encounter.

It’s October and they’re running low on supplies, ammo and horses that haven’t been shot out from under their men; and Morgan sees an opportunity and takes it, captures a Union Major and his men for their horses and their guns, lets them go because prisoners eat food that their army can’t spare.

Lets them go except for one scrawny, loud-mouthed prisoner of war, who is dressed like a soldier in Lincoln’s Army but claims to be a Confederate spy.

“If you gentlemen would care to look, beneath the blue wool of my uniform you will discover I am pure, Confederate gray.”

“So we’re supposed to strip you naked?” one of the guards wonders nastily, and the prisoner has the sense to look a little concerned for his welfare. “And you’ll be gray?”

“Now, let’s not be hasty,” the prisoner says, leaning away from the guard and widening his false grin. Raylan rubs the scar on his chest, stays near the edge of the camp and doesn’t smile.

“What do you think?” Capt. Mullen asks, gesturing across the camp at the dark-haired prisoner in Union blue. “Is he a Union man? Is he one of ours?” he adds, which means something entirely different, Rachel’s shadowy railroad and smuggling human freight north.

Raylan considers that, for a moment. Boyd may not wear a cause for any longer than he’d wear an ill-fitting shirt, but he has always been an exceptional thief.

“Should we hang him, or run him through with a bayonet?”

“I think he’s a liar,” Raylan tells his captain, because the sun’s still up and a few new horses and some Union grog don’t mean they’re not at war.

But it will be evening soon, so he marches across the field, dodges the company’s tents and the cook fires, stands a few feet away and waits for the prisoner to stop irritating the guards and look his way.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually Boyd Crowder lifts his head. “ _Raylan_!” he announces, sweeping out both arms and grinning brighter than the molten gold of the sun setting behind the trees. “Boy, I near about dug my way to China searching for your sorry bones!”

Mullen’s followed Raylan. “Wait — you know him?” he asks, glowering suspiciously at them both.

“Sure I do,” Raylan tells him. “Capt. Mullen, this is Boyd Crowder. He’s the finest horse thief in eastern Kentucky.”

The guards grab Boyd’s arms, and from the looks on their faces, they wouldn’t mind reaching for their guns and sparing Boyd the honor of a noose around his neck. Morgan’s men are all cavalry, and horse thieving is a serious crime.

“Why, Raylan Givens,” Boyd chides softly, shaking his head. “Are you trying to get me killed?” _Only_ eastern _Kentucky?_ he doesn’t say, but he raises his eyebrows at Raylan, and Raylan’s lip twitches until he bites it to hide his grin.

“Oh, untwist your britches,” he tells the guards. “Boyd’s obviously too stupid to be a thief. What self-respecting horse thief would find himself drafted into the Army?”

Boyd scowls, insulted, and Raylan laughs. It’s dusk now, nearly dark. A few more hours and he can retire to his tent, pull Boyd down and feel the callused edges of Boyd’s thieving fingers rub along the pink scar on Raylan’s ribs.

There’s still a war on: the smell of infected wounds and dead horses and gunpowder, cannon fire exploding through his ears. But there’s lightning and moonshine in Boyd’s eyes, and the war can wait till dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> As always and expected for me, so much research. The title is from "And Am I Born to Die?" which is excellent and should be listened to (go look up Doc Watson on YouTube).
> 
> Kentucky was famous for attempting to broker compromises (and proud of it, because Clay), and the Governor did try that again after SC's secession (to no avail). But it was also a state with the third-highest (?) number of slaves in the US - and different from what might be expected, not that a few men owned hundreds of slaves, but that lots of people owned 1-7, including up in the hard-to-farm hills of eastern Kentucky. Because farming was difficult, people in Harlan would also have raised mules, or (in the Crowder family case) found other profitable lines of work. If you google "KY in the Civil War" you can get a lot of this, and it's pretty interesting! (Rachel is clearly modeled after real black women who constantly risked their lives running other people north to freedom, and it amused me to create a new founding story for Nobles Holler.)
> 
> When dancinbutterfly prompted "Civil War AU" she intended Raylan to join the Union and Boyd to join the Confederacy (hey, white supremacy), but I do love turning prompts on their heads. Come visit me on tumblr if you'd like to prompt things. :)


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